Actual Page Load Speed with Stopwatch

[Milligan Hay - Iowa d:^)]

Good Morning John and Matt,

I thought that I would take some actual measurements of the website at the quietest time of the day.....right at midnight Sunday night, Monday morning.

My actual internet speed is 11.7 Mb/sec download, with my test bouncing from Chicago.... so the speed is very good on my end.

With that data, I then licked on several pages and waited for them to load up.... Each one of the pages took an average of 22.6 seconds to go from click to functioning page.   The range was very similar.... 22.4 seconds to 22.8 seconds...... so it is very consistent.

I was using a Winblows Exploder (sorry, inside joke) Windows Explorer XP browser.

The speed is about the same, no matter which board I click on to.

I hope that you might find this data helpful.....  Craig.

[John_Walter · Accepted solution]

Hi, Craig: Thanks for the analysis. Yes, it is helpful. I would hope that the speeds will improve for most people after the first one or two visits to the new forums. During those visits, the system enables downloads of material on the page that is cached for subsequent visits, I'm told. Speed should improve. Our technology vendor is looking at the speed issue, and is even considering re-locating the servers to be closer to where most of our visitors reside. We shall see.

Again, Craig, much appreciate the good feedback.

-- John Walter, A.com

[r3020]

You need to figure out a way to get more threads on the front page. You need to just list threads and then they could expand when you click on the thread, Should have about 15 replies to a thread on each page after it opens.

[Canuck_2]

If it helps here is what I find on the backroads of Ontario.

As I noted earlier my download speed is a little over 7 Mb/s, slower than Craig's

From click to full page I run 2, that is just one digit, seconds and on a few occasions 3.

I kept wondering why everyone complained about slow loading.

Not sure if this impacts the situation but we do have fibre optic cable to the house and machine is running Windows 7 Ultimate and browser from that system I think.

[Milligan Hay - Iowa d:^)]

Hmmm..... maybe their host server is located up in Toronto?

I always thought that the Meredith Publishing systems were tied in to Freeze-Notis Weather, here in Des Moines.

My brother does some of the super high tech upkeep on the Freeze-Notis mainframe....from time to time. ..... I will have to ask him.

[Milligan Hay - Iowa d:^)]

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@r3020 wrote:

You need to figure out a way to get more threads on the front page. You need to just list threads and then they could expand when you click on the thread, Should have about 15 replies to a thread on each page after it opens.

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The old site had Fifty threads per page.... that was probably just the right amount, before it slid off of page one.

[Canuck_2]

I live about the same distance from Detroit and closer to Port Huron Michigan than Toronto.

[MattSnyder44]

Meredith web sites are not tied to Freese-Notis weather at all. Freese-Notis does provide our weather information, though.

Internet connection speed is the most important factor in loading pages. However, it's also worth noting that individual computers render pages at different speeds. Not suprisingly, well-maintained and newer computers load pages much faster than old computers.

[kraft-t]

There would be more room but you have to have 15 tag lines per post.

[Jim Meade / Iowa City]

To speed up loading and to reduce the space of posts, one can go into settings and turn signatures off.  Some people have a signature block that takes up 10 lines or more.  One can also change font size if one's eyes can handle it. Just like turning the Twitter stream off.  It probably pays to take the time to browse through all the settings and try the interesting ones out.  It's easy to go back if one doesn't like the change.